Yes. There are significant price differences between Europe & India, the US & India and to a lesser extent Europe & the US, and there are several different things at work here.
Firstly, peering in Europe is dirt cheap.
Secondly, in almost all cases the last-mile lines are laid by the government or incumbent service provider for use by any & all service providers and because *everyone* is using that same infrastructure, whoever owns the lines gets paid no matter which provider the user is actually with.
Thirdly, peering in Europe is dirt cheap.
Fourth, in many cases a significant amount of traffic is staying within Europe because either content being accessed in Europe is hosted in Europe itself OR the major sites all have CDN nodes in the peering exchanges which causes said traffic to remain in Europe even if it comes from the US or Asia or elsewhere.
Fifth, peering in Europe is dirt cheap.
Sixth, many Europeans are used to not being deprived of bandwidth, and as such many users usage remains at manageable levels.
Finally, even transcontinental lines are dirt cheap (especially US-Europe routes).
I've was in Romania in 2008 and even at that time I found the Internet access (and mobile access for that matter) to be surprisingly good - even outside of the capital. Their government has been doing a lot of good work in that respect - so much so that Constanta now tops the speedtest records for the European continent.
They are a little bit lucky though because of their geographic location - a stones throw from Germany (via Hungary) whose telecoms are doing great things, and France, who is not only home to Alcatel Lucent, but who currently have some of the busiest Internet routes in the world, with average bitrates of over 2Tbit/s. Furthermore, they're "on the way" to these places from Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia & Iran (though some ISPs from that region also partially route over Telecom Italia for the sake of diversity).
Likewise the access is quite good in the Ukraine (mostly in cities though), although some Ukrainian ISPs have a slightly interesting pricing scheme: you pay some amount per month as you would expect, but your access speed is different for domestic traffic (usually 10 or 100mbit/s) and international traffic (as low as 1mbit/s unlimited for US$6 per month, but 100mbit/s is something like US$50 or 60). It used to be similar in NZ but that was a few years ago.
Thanks for explaining. Makes a lot of sense especially the domestic and regional usage part. I have noticed this thing in the whole of Europe that most European websites are made in their regional language instead of English and so automatically attract local people. For example, websites in France normally use French for their websites, German websites use German language and target local market, Russian websites are mostly in Russian including top sites such as Rambler, Spain and Portugal also targets local audience (though they target Latin America to an extent too due to the same local language across the continents) and so on. It is quite different from countries such as India where all websites are in English and mostly hosted in the US. Even for normal sites, Indians would probably search for a English website located in US or US rather than for a Hindi or a local dialect website. Most Indian webmasters also do not target the Hindi audience or local audience as Indian online market is not the best and they also do not host here as hosting in India is also a lot more expensive than US etc. So, it makes sense why Europe does not need to spend up too much trans-continental bandwidth and in many cases trans-country bandwidth as most European websites are hosted in their local servers itself.
In short, the percentage of users who use 60-70TB a month on these servers is very, very small. Most users would struggle to use even 100GB, let alone 1, 10 or 100TB. Basically about 1,000 customers at $30 each is enough to break even on a 10gbit/s international line from NYC to Europe (though as per previous examples probably 2,000 customers to pay for all the other incidentals like staff and whatnot).
Furthermore, most of this bandwidth is being served to domestic audiences - and peering which is dirt cheap even compared to a line of this size. Going by the price of a 10gbit/s peering line in Europe where you're looking at 1,200EUR per month tops, and it's even cheaper in the US. So then we see that we've got, say, US$64,000 worth of bandwidth costs per month (assuming we only had two peering lines & two international lines) which can be taken care of with just ~4k customers - compared to India which is quite significantly more.
As we know, companies like 100TB & Softlayer (who have multiple data centres as far as I know) and the various hosting providers in Europe have WAY more than 4k customers, so it becomes a simple matter of volume versus usage: they have huge volumes of customers who hardly use anything close to the amount of bandwidth they're actually purchasing, so while the lines are vastly oversold, they're oversold in such a way that it doesn't really affect anyone.
This situation is, however, very different to residential broadband in that even a $50m data center is peanuts compared to what an ISP can potentially spend on infrastructure. Moreover, a larger percentage of residential broadband customers are far more likely to actually *use* the bandwidth that is allocated to them compared to a hosting customer.
I agree but for somebody like 100tb it is a bit different as they are MAINLY used by BANDWIDTH HOGGERS only. So, a person who spends 100GB would probably never use them as they can go for a shared hosting,
VPS or a low end dedicated server at an EXCELLENT dedicated server provider like Softlayer instead of a not-so-great customer support high bandwidth provider such as 100tb. They can get it for a lot cheaper and also get a lot better quality with some better provider if they do not need such massive bandwidth and have normal websites. But for the most part it makes sense and thanks for explaining.
